Oracle Blog

Focus on eMarketing and Electronic Software Distribution

Wednesday Mar 21, 2007

Thanks to some excellent engineering work by Harley Milne, we now have
an RSS feed available on our New
Downloads page. By subscribing to this feed, you'll be notified
whenever a new download is released on Sun Download Center.
To subscribe, just grab the feed URL from the small orange RSS icon
near the top right of the New
Downloads section, as shown here:

This offers a very easy and convenient way to be notified whenever new
software is released, and I hope it's helpful for our customers.

Note that similar feeds are also available now for the list of Top Sun
Software Downloads and Top
Java Downloads if those topics are of interest. (I'm not sure
how often those lists are updated but believe it's done monthly.)

Wednesday Mar 14, 2007

We are currently devoting a lot of time and resources towards
building an all new download application to replace the one powering
today's Sun Download
Center
(SDLC). Why? Because the current SDLC code base started in 1997, and as
you can imagine, that is terribly ancient in Internet Years. After
careful analysis, it was determined we should not put more time and
effort into trying to make an older system meet today's needs. A
new system is needed to provide the flexibility, capabilities, and
advanced functionality supporting a "Web 2.0" download
experience.

As our current system is pushing tremendous
volume, obviously it is a very complex system and cannot be
replaced overnight. We've been going through the full process of
designing a new system, from business to functional requirements, user
experience enhancements, and so forth. (We recently saw the first
conference room demo of the new system -- very exciting, it works!)
While initial emphasis has to be on a functional replacement
for the current system, we want to put in many usability
enhancements as quickly as possible.

I wanted to share one of the new designs, to give a flavor of
what we're working on. One of the key challenges with current systems
is handling "bundles", which are essentially multiple software products
put together in logical bundles to facilitate marketing, selling, and
buying. The prime example right now is "Sun's
Software Portfolio." As you can see, this provides the user
the option to select multiple products for download in one transaction.
But when you actually get to the download page itself, we needed a
solution to present so many products and links!

Options discussed included a sequential set of pages --
download product 1, then hit continue to the next one -- but this
required a lot of page loads and forced users to download in a set
order. Another option was to make one BIG download page with all the
products and links from top to bottom, but that's really awkward and
difficult at best. After some collective brainstorming, we came up with
a new design that we're very pleased with, and Greg Reimer
provided some great JavaScript code to make it all work. Here's a
mock-up to show the concept:

When the page first loads, all of the sections are collapsed -- with
one glance, you can see all the products selected for download.
Clicking the "+" icon expands to the full download page for that
product, as illustrated for "Product 3." When you're done, you can
close up that download page section, then expand the next one and so
on. This solution eliminates the issues seen with the other options and
is one of the many user experience improvements we'll be rolling out in
the (hopefully) not too distant future.

About

I helped design, build, and manage download systems at Sun for many years. Recently I've focused on web eMarketing systems. Occasionally, I write about other interests, such as holography and jazz guitar. Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/garyzel